On February 17, when the latest CIS barometer was made public, corruption was only one of the three main problems that Spain has for 4.1% of the population. It was three days after the PSOE forced its deputy from the Canary Islands, Juan Bernardo Fuentes, better known as Tito Berni, to resign. The scandal had not yet jumped to the newspapers, but less than 15 days later it has become the only topic of political debate and has served for the PSOE and the PP to go back to throwing their heads over corruption.
If the PP points to the PSOE for the Mediator case, in which the former deputy Fuentes is implicated, also emphasizing the fact that the people involved met other deputies or senators of the party, the Socialists respond by reminding him of the Kitchen or the Catalonia operation. In turn, the PP recovers the case of the ERE and the sentence that fell on two socialist presidents, Manuel Chaves and José Antonio Griñán, and warns that “there is no case that covers Tito Berni,” said the general coordinator of the PP yesterday , Elias Bendodo.
The popular ones are rubbing their hands because the case broke out less than three months before the May 28 elections, while the PSOE limits what happened to the attitude of a person who has already been expelled from the socialist group. To this end, he relies on the honor of the rest of the deputies, to whom he has offered legal representation so that they can defend themselves against the suspicions that link them to the Mediator case.
“Be very careful not to stain the reputation of people who have nothing to do” with the case, cried yesterday the Minister of the Presidency, Félix Bolaños, to later poke out his chest for the “different way”, according to the minister, who have the PSOE and the PP to face their cases of alleged corruption. “The PSOE, when it finds a rotten apple, immediately expels it from the basket because we have nothing to fear and nothing to hide”; However, the PP, said Bolaños, “maintains it and lives with corruption as normal, perhaps because they have something to fear.”
In the PP they are not far behind in their criticism and they try by all means to ensure that the Socialists are not successful in their attempt to limit the case to the Canary Islands and Juan Bernardo Fuentes, and they point directly to the Government, to ask for explanations, until the point that Elías Bendodo spoke yesterday of the “X” of the case, recalling the X of the GAL, with which Felipe González was targeted. “In the social fabric of this case there are many X,” said the general coordinator of the PP, who summons Pedro Sánchez to explain and apologize.
But socialist criticism also came from the Minister of Territorial Policy and government spokesperson, Isabel Rodríguez, who criticized the “double yardstick” of the popular, whom she accused of practicing “more sophisticated corruption, that is, of those who They take it to Switzerland for hundreds of millions of euros”, referring to the Bárcenas case. She also pointed out “the ties of political affiliation” that Alberto Núñez Feijóo maintains with “Jorge Fernández Díaz”, for whom the Prosecutor’s Office requests 15 years in prison for parapolice espionage on former PP treasurer Luis Bárcenas.
The PP accuses the PSOE of trying to link someone of the popular in the plot, which affects, for the moment, the one who was a socialist deputy and other executive positions in the region. The PP, when asked about the meeting of its current leader in the Canary Islands, Manuel Domínguez, with the mediator Marco Antonio Navarro Tacoronte – as he explained it on a radio station – limited himself to throwing balls out: “I ask the PSOE that it does not entangle, that the scandal is huge, and that it does not try to cover one thing with the other”, because the case has such a dimension that “they will not be able to cover anything”.